> (Those audio codecs were written by two engineers with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Stanford. When they weren’t teasing each other about which school was better, they were writing mathematical audio code that I was scared to touch. You would no more let a regular engineer mess with code like that than you’d let a bike mechanic rebuild the transmission in a Porsche. They had an occasional poker game I played in. The only reason I didn’t lose all my money was that one of them enjoyed his vodka.)
To add some context to the side-note, for those unfamiliar with the story, the BBC used that word in an editorial/journalistic context, quoting the racial abuse a man suffered after being intentionally hit with a car while waiting on the bus. The victim's family were determined that the BBC show pictures showing the extent of his injuries and quote, in full, the racist tirade he was subject to during the attack.
Whether or not you agree with them using that word on a news report, I think the context and intent are really important.
That’s the fastest u-turn I’ve done in a while. Context matters.
So by avoiding the BBC site, you're going against the victim's wishes?
Edit: on reading further on this, there seems to have been more outrage at the BBC reporting what was said, as they were asked to do, than at the near murder of the guy in an unprovoked racist attack.
> on reading further on this, there seems to have been more outrage at the BBC reporting what was said, as they were asked to do, than at the near murder of the guy in an unprovoked racists attack.
That's modern society in a nutshell for ya. It seems like the priority is more about virtue signaling than it is about seeking truth and justice in all things.
For most non-racists, it goes without saying that race-related violence is unacceptable.
Sadly it also happens often enough that we aren't going to tweet/write a comment saying "this is bad" every single time it happens.
Whereas the BBC journalist using that word was a) not a common event b) as seen in this thread not such a binary good/bad thing even among non-racists and c) affects news standards that broadcast to huge numbers of people.
If I could prevent one physical attack by allowing one use of the word on the TV I would, but I don't think it's at all hypocritical or virtue signalling that many people felt it more important to talk about the journalism than the case being reported.
You remember the good old days when all politics was local? Now it’s all International. All of it. The British Broadcasting Corp. is a Crown Corporation mostly funded through TV licenses charged to British subjects when I last checked. Maybe that’s changed, but it’s not in my wheelhouse as an American citizen on American soil to help regulate your lexicon. Do what you think is right, but consider the place in which you choose to proselytize with greater care. That’s what the Twatter is for.
> The victim's family were determined that the BBC show pictures showing the extent of his injuries and quote, in full, the racist tirade he was subject to during the attack.
Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this sentence -- could you elaborate? I think my confusion is centered on the word 'determined'.
> The victim's family were [resolute] that the BBC [should] show pictures showing the extent of his injuries and quote, in full, the racist tirade he was subject to during the attack.
The victim's family specifically requested that the journalist repeat the phrase used in full. The journalist/editors obviously made the choice, but they chose to go by the family's wishes rather than by the general consensus on whether it's acceptable to say that word even in the context of reporting about it.
It got auto collapsed because it's a reply to my comment that got flagged and killed. Almost certainly users flagging it (although oddly it's also positively upvoted) not a mod decision.
Yes you're right, sorry if anyone read my comment to imply that BBC actively used that word to describe a black person themselves.
But it's pretty much accepted in the UK and especially UK media that if reporting on it, you say "the n word", especially if you're a white reporter.
A lot of people were extremely offended, even in the context you've added, and the BBC have now acknowledged it was wrong.
The reason for today's boycott is partly their delay (and initial defence), and partly a wide, subjective view of institutional racism among large parts of the BBC.
This is obviously a very complex topic, but for now can't we at least agree that we don't need to hear the n-word purposefully spoken by BBC News?
It's the same thing as saying "the n word" to me. You're still telling someone the word and it shouldn't matter in this instance, because they're reporting on what was said, written, or done.
Context and intent matter. If a single word causes so much outrage, you need to look at who exactly is getting offended. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of black people don't find offense in it being said at all - again, if you give them the context. Just telling them "BBC guy said the word!" is a bit disingenuous.
> It's the same thing as saying "the n word" to me
The difference IMO is that one is a reminder to anyone listening that they should never use that word, whereas the other is a normalisation or hearing it.
I'm certainly not an expert on this subject though, and being white myself I take my lead in this area, and on this story, from non-white people who I know or who I follow in politics/media/etc. I can't speak to how the majority of black people on the UK feel, but definitely plenty of them understood the context and were still very outspoken against it.
I don't like the BBC because of its political slant, but in this case I feel their reporting it verbatim accurately absolutely helps the cause against racism. That's my problem with suppressing hate speech. Best way to get rid of it is to keep the people who deploy it out in the open, where the free market of ideas will dispatch with them efficiently. It's how someone like Daryl Davis can literally change the world:
> the free market of ideas will dispatch of them efficiently
This is a bad concept that is far detached from reality. Participating in public discourse is not like selling wheat or steel.
Sticking with the theme, a "free market of ideas" has significant transaction costs, information asymmetry and some actors wield significant market power (media organisations, public figures).
It's a nice theory but there are many classic market failures at play here that should dispel any idea of reaching an efficient outcome.
BBC news and political reporting (the thing politicians care about) have a massive bias towards the current UK government - for the last 5+ years that means a pro-austerity xenophobic anti-EU bent. If they veer from that they get their funding cut.
BBC radio and drama/comedy/kids' TV studio content is generally very "politically correct" left-wing as the vast majority of employees in these industries are left wing. The stereotype of the BBC show with exactly one gay, one black and one disabled kid among its three-strong casts is not far off the mark...
Take a list of countries in the world that have the best HDI rankings, press freedom rankings, universal healthcare and so on. Almost all are run by parties who are described primarily as being center-right or center-left.
Thank you. Do these people not realize that centrist basically means stable and successful? Probably just sad sacks who want things to go sour.
And I want to be clear, in the U.S. Dems are a center-left party and GOP is a (increasingly) far-right party. You can see this objectively by the percent of the time each member flips. Approx. around 80% GOP never flips versus only 20% Dems.
The Democratic party as an institution is not very left at all.
There are people who identify as Democrats who could be described as extreme left, and they may get a lot of airtime, but they do not represent the party and do not influence it's policies.
> Everything I've read and heard about US politics would seems to suggest that the Dems are being pulled increasingly towards the extreme left
We are either reading very different news, or your use of “extreme left” is highly out of sync with anything approaching common usage. Wake me me up when they start nationalising pensions
> Almost all are run by parties who are described primarily as being center-right or center-left.
They're described like that by the local standards of the country they're in. But if you were to transplant e.g. some "right wing" parties in certain European countries to a country like the US you'd have an extremist left wing party by local standards.
So it's no more evidence that things move towards the "center" in general than people in Venice and Mexico city saying "uphill" and "downhill" being evidence that those two cities are situated at the same altitude.
Most developed European countries have a tax to GDP ratio 10-15% higher than the US.
Fiscally conservative right wing parties in those countries typically run on a platform of at most reducing that by 3-5%.
If you then take what they'd do to military spending (at most 1/2 or 1/4 what the US spends per capita), social services (maybe a bit less spending, but not dismantling it), the state's regulatory role, fuel taxes etc. I don't think this is a far-fetched assertion.
Eisenhower's idea is attractive, but incorrect. The extremes are where the most enthusiasm is. People in the middle who lean one way or the other can find themselves pushed to go further and further that way, or risk being treated as unreliable allies. The "gutters", in turn, are thus encourage to drift further and further from the center.
People don't turn out for centrists. They turn out for extremism. You'd like to think that sooner or later people would find that they've veered so far one way that the only correction is to jump over the center line, and restore Eisenhower's faith, but I don't see much evidence of that.
If you consider the current leadership of the United States to be "centrist", then you and I have irreconciably different definitions of "center".
It has has a history of veering more and more wildly to each side. The previous leader was an exciting cipher when elected -- he turned out to be centrist, but was only elected because a lot of people imagined he was more to the left than he turned out to be. And at that, he was completely stymied in his progressive platform by an extremely right-wing legislature -- which turned out to be so popular that their party repeatedly increased their power in the legislature. Before him, the country elected a clear idiot, and then re-elected him after starting a war on clearly false provocation.
People were more likely to appeal to Eisenhower's approach in the 20th century, but in the 21st, the extremes have better access to mass media, making them better able to cast the center as extremist and shifting the Overton window. I see this only increasing. It's possible that it won't succeed this November, but even if it doesn't, I don't believe that the trend will change.
America is an abomination, but it’s very far from the only country, and the vast majority of rich, free countries are run by centrists who were voted into power
I find that America tends to export its culture. Its genius is its willingness to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which others find repulsive and yet, gradually, succumb to.
Already I find hints that other English-speaking countries are studying the effectiveness of our extremist tactics (goaded, in part, by our geopolitical opponents). I think you'll see more of it elsewhere in coming decades. They'll do it because it works.
It's not a foregone conclusion, but watch out for it. I don't know how to tell you to prevent it; it works inexorably. I hope they figure something out, even if it's just having a national character that's more repulsed by it than ours turns out to be. But do not rely on that, because we're just 65 years removed from Eisenhower ourselves.
It's how someone like Daryl Davis can literally change the world
I'd forgotten about this story, but it's a really good one. Sometimes we forget our humanity. If you want to convince people, don't browbeat them or belittle them. Do your homework, understand what they believe, and just generally show you're a good person.
We need a new narrative to bubble up through the media that empowers voices of reason and calm, not voices that divide.
Every single instance of genocide in the last 150 years or so started as just some folks expressing a relatively fringe ideology, with plenty of others debating against it vigorously. For whatever reason, that ideology caught on, and then the mass murders start.
People, as a general group, don't evaluate their beliefs in a rational manner. They are biased in favor of the first things they heard; and whatever is most palatable given their emotions and things they already believe.
It's how you can get into a situation where massive numbers of people believe some combination of the ideas earth is 6000 years old and also flat and also that 5G causes covid and also covid was a hoax and face masks are just a mkultra trauma psyop run by the pedophile satanic illuminati cabal run by Hillary Clinton and George Soros.
If people can hold all that in their heads, and not believe any evidence to the contrary; then the idea of suppressing the notions that Black folks/Jewish folks/Muslims/migrants/whatever are the root of society's problems and we should do violence to them starts to make a lot of sense.
I also think that the idea that markets, particularly abstract ones, such as the "free market of ideas" are capable of producing long-term positive outcomes for most participants is, at best, without evidence and at worst pure fallacious thinking.
I think it was a charismatic figure convincing others that they are victims in most cases.
That is not the whole truth of course, but far more accurate than saying the freedom of expression hurts minorities and leads to genocide. That is some class-A bullshit and revisionist of history.
On the contrary, restricting people from stating their opinion reinforces their believe that the world is conspiring against them. You need to have some trust issue to come up with ideas like that.
Flat earthers are only a problem to themselves so I don't understand your fascination with that group.
The free market of ideas has produced the most free societies. Not just in history, it can be also be seen today.
> They are biased
That is true for nobody or everybody. In both cases it wouldn't matter, would it?
Flat earthers may only be a problem of themselves, but climate denialists, anti-vaxxers, and creationists are not. (Creationists are constantly fighting to have theology taught as science, and even today biology textbooks isolate and underplay evolution to avoid offending them.)
As you say, they all respond to attempts to restrict their falsehoods play into the paranoid narrative. But sunlight doesn't disinfect it, either. They've set themselves a very attractive head-I-win-tails-you lose scenario, making them impossible to stamp out or even mitigate the damage.
I look forward to the day when one of these makes an appearance on one of those prototype/collector forums.
"So my friend who used to work at the DOE was getting rid of some stuff and he had this iPod, and it looks like a regular iPod but I took a look inside and does anybody know what the hell this is...?"
I look forward to the day when one of these makes an appearance on one of those prototype/collector forums.
It's surprising how frequently restricted computing devices end up in public hands.
Through a relative who worked for a guy who knew a guy and so on, I ended up with the world's most awesome GRiD Compass back in the 80's. It was supposedly formerly used by someone in the Reagan administration, and had big stickers on the bottom listing all the countries where it was never to be used.
I threw it away when I got my first IBM XT. Stupid of me.
A whole bunch of Sony devkits have gone on auction at one time, because the company went into bankruptcy and appointed administrators just went ahead to sell all company property. Of course Sony protested saying that they can't sell the devkits, but the administrators basically told them to get in the long line of people with some kind of claim. It's company property it's getting sold.
I'm missing some context. Why would Sony devkits be sensitive? What exactly do you mean by "devkit"? I though of those development kits with one specific processor you want to get familiar with, plus auxiliary hardware and software to help access it.
You're on the right track, but they're usually considered rentals not purchased property. The Apple ARM devkit Mac Mini, for example, has to be returned to Apple at the end of the preview.
What's interesting is that some people have the old (Intel) developer transition kits, even though Apple has done extraordinarily well in the intervening time period. One wonders how Apple missed them…
"devkit" in this context means a development version of a Sony gaming console, like the PlayStation. They are different from a regular retail model in that they can run unsigned code so you can develop games for them. The reason why they are sensitive is that you could use a devkit to learn how the console works internally and potentially find some exploits that could be used in the retail models. Any company using them has to sign a very restrictive NDA that basically requires the kits to be locked up, you can't talk about their development environment or precise technical details. Sony would never sell you a devkit until you pass their security assesment, and you are only allowed to have them on the condition that they are returned to Sony when no longer needed.
Obviously, the severity of the problem depends on what gets auctioned. PS4 kits? Probably not much, pretty much everything about the console and its capabilities has been leaked a long time ago. But if some PS5 devkits were to go missing right now it would be a huge deal as the console isn't even out yet.
> Why would Sony devkits be sensitive? What exactly do you mean by "devkit"?
"Devkits" (at least in the context used here) are hardware for developing console videogames. Console manufacturers work quite hard to control who gets to develop for their platform and how. The devkits are often quite expensive and you won't (usually) get your hands on one unless you work for a company that has signed a very detailed contract with the console manufacturer.
Exactly, and often times extraordinarily valuable because they can be used for reverse engineering, or learning how the key signing or DRM works, or can be bypassed.
Of course, most legitimate indie communities stay away from this, preferring clean-room RE efforts.
The drunk engineer is my friend, it was his birthday, and it wasn’t a stunt. He was authorized to have the device out for testing, and brought it with him to his birthday at a beer bar.
You know the rest of the story. Apple is entirely familiar with the Osborne Effect.
Thank you, appreciate your response. I'm glad he wasn't penalized for an honest mistake. I've heard of folks citing policy and firing great employees, good to hear a happy end to the whole situation.
A marketing stunt that involved the police conducting a raid on Jason Chen’s home and then barring Gizmodo from future Apple events? Yeah, that’d be one hell of a PR stunt if it was.
I remember reading a conspiracy that the iPhone 4 was left at that bar, because Samsung was about to announce the latest Galaxy phone. Apple did this to take the wind out of their sails.
yeah, me too , but the 'Apple Police' aspect of that marketing stunt left me with a negative impression -- so I guess it wasn't an all-around net good advertising wise.
Not sure if this is the story you're thinking of, but I do recall hearing a while ago about Chinese irons and kettles that came with some, er, undocumented features:
I think the focus on nuclear power in the article is naive at best. Bechtel helps run the national labs, which work on (among other things) nuclear weapons and anti-proliferation. I would think it's more likely this would be for anti-proliferation work. Have a CIA asset walk near a suspected nuclear facility with this in their pocket while looking like a civilian. Collect radiation data, and if they get arrested or something, it's just an ipod.
I have heard Russia decided to build more dangerous reactor types like the one in Chernobyl because they are cheaper + they could use the same radioactive material for nuclear weapons.
The radiation detector is either a naive hypothesis, or a false flag. If you want to pretend that your audio player is completely normal, you don't connect any abnormal devices to it. Moreover, any facility in the world that prohibits visitors to have electronics on them prohibits ALL electronics. No one would make an exception for “just an ipod”. Neither would secret services that have been dealing with bugs for decades be fooled by “just an ipod”. If there was additional hardware inside, my guess that it was for unattended covert short range data transfer. Maybe they have even used the famous rock™ interface:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16614209
But audio recording would be most straightforward function, as it is built in. Switch (or simply re-flash) the player that belongs to journalist or politician when they leave it, then recover the data periodically. That would mean they knew who their target was.
By the way, which model did Steve Jobs use? It might be possible that these “secret agents” were not secret agents at all. I suspect that any official business starts and ends with you signing papers that prevent you from, say, talking to newspapers about it because you feel like it, and existence of one-time high-profile project like that is something any sane agency would really like to keep secret. “No paper trail” is actually the most non-ordinary part of all of this, secrecy agreements are a common thing. Oral order to work with two random guys (because they have ominous business cards?), and tell them every corporate secret they need to know? Seems suspicious.
I can’t quite figure out how a Geiger counter would make sense.
Typical Geiger tubes (and high voltage generator) would be too big to fit in an iPod.
But why would they need such tight integration with the iPod itself? The data isn’t big (each reading would only be an 8 or 16bit int) and could easily be stored on some small flash by something like an PIC12/MSP430.
So you’d only need some simple trigger, which might be a hidden menu item which flips a GPIO to take a reading. Or even just tap the audio output and trigger on a specific frequency being played.
Audio recordings might make sense. I don’t think the iPod video had a built in mic, so one would need to be added. That doesn’t ring totally true to me either though...
The whole thing seems quite weird. I can’t really see any good reason for such tight integration with the iPod.
Have you heard of a scintillator? They are much more efficient than a GM tube and can be constructed from various materials. You can construct them out of silicon, but the energy resolution is poor and does not allow for isotope identification. Using a NaI(Ti) crystal would have allowed them to both measure absorbed dose as well as identify the types of radioactive materials present. As there are commercial products today which are the size of an iPod and detect radiation, I see this as a feasible product.
You would want the tight integration if you wanted to steganographically store the recorded information for covert exfiltration. The agencies driving this have a high level of paranoia and may have deemed this necessary for a variety of reasons.
There are other detectors you could use. You can use a simple photodiode too. But generally they don’t have the same sensitivity. Generally the sensitivity is too low for most radiation monitoring applications as I understand it.
Steganographic storage would make sense, but the article mentions storing on a separate partition.
So the tight integration still seems odd to me. Another comment suggested that they wanted to gain general “iPod” modification skills for other projects. That seems like an interesting idea.
As an aside... I kind of like the idea of playing specific songs, or a sequence of songs to trigger a secondary processor (which is sampling frequencies played). This could potentially take over the USB port if necessary.
That generation of iPods used hard drives, it was possible to replace those with smaller flash drives. This would give you a lot of space to add sensors/secondary compute. And could be done without coordinating with Apple.
It does seem weird that they took the chance of this leaking too... and I would have thought they would have taken any other route possible.
This is DoE I think, not any other 3 letter agency, so they're probably not too worried about it getting out after the fact. Who the hell uses an iPod anymore? Now you'd just use the CCD camera on any modern smartphone, or count DRAM bit errors or something. Then again, they could have done that with the iPod and didn't, which suggests they wanted to measure energy levels maybe. Tight integration makes a lot of sense if you want something that, when opened up and compared to an off the shelf iPod, doesn't look any different.
CCD cameras or counting bit errors doesn’t really have great sensitivity for radiation detection. This is why they are generally not used to monitoring projects and people stick with Geiger tubes. This is my understand anyway (having worked on these kinds of projects).
Its funny really because I never took my uncle seriously in the 90's when he said I should develop my own Geiger counter amongst other electronic devices. Of course I didnt realise the significance of the fact he had access to the Prestel system which the Govt and Royal Family used for messaging before email became the standard in days when computer hacking was still legal. He also supplied GCHQ with telecomes equipment. Probably contributes to reasons why he broke out of HMP Parkhurst and tried to escape the country. If you wrote his degree titles out in full, it would take half a page of A4 before he could even start writing a letter.
It makes me wonder what he knew back then, but as I cant visit him, if he is ever let out, or I dont get another attempt on my life, maybe one day we'll meet & he'll spill the beans more openly.
Of course, I can get nodules of raw uranium sticking out the soil eroded by the sea along the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, UK. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to make a dirty nuke or even a decent nuke. There is enough information online from reputable sources like the BBC, Youtube showing 50year WW2 US & UK Govt archive footage and interviews in scientific journals who worked on the Manhattan Project and other nuclear projects to piece together the "meta data" in order to make one, including spotting the spurious info which will make you fail if one should attempt to make one.
You may be able to find uranium ore with relative ease, but enrichment is a nation-state level project that is unlikely to escape the notice of the world's intelligence and energy agencies.
According to the Federation of American Scientists:
> Uranium-235, while occuring in natural uranium to the extent of only 0.71percent, is so fissionable with slow neutrons that a self-sustaining fission chain reaction can be made in a reactor constructed from natural uranium and a suitable moderator, such as heavy water or graphite, alone.
Also, anyone who can build a Farnsworth Fusor could generate neutrons suitable for enrichment. You are overestimating the difficulty of obtaining and producing dangerous quantities of radioactive materials. This is a convenient falsehood as it breeds a level of comfort in the population, but it is certainly not true.
There is a huge gulf between the abundance necessary for criticality and that necessary for prompt criticality. Even rudimentary, low-yield weapons design requires HEU, likely over 50% 235 (and if you have the capability to enrich beyond 20%, the barrier to enriching up towards "weapons grade" is comparatively low.) I won't contradict the FAS's claim that this is within the reach of any _rogue state_, but it's not something you can achieve by bombarding natural ore with your garage-project fusor.
What stops you from using criticality in a breeder setup? Once you can produce enough plutonium, you have yourself most of the ingredients for a basic gun type weapon.
In any case, you have everything you need for a dirty bomb.
Usually "breeder" indicates a reactor with a fully closed fuel cycle that generates more fissile fuel than it consumes. A Pu-239 breeder would need to begin with critical mass of Pu-239 to begin this fuel cycle, in addition to the U-238 feedstock you are wanting to bombard. Kind of puts the cart before the horse. Additionally, the engineering for a liquid sodium or molten salt cooling system (water is too strong a fast-neutron moderator for this application) goes beyond the means of the hobbyist or extremist group.
I don't think this is what you meant, though. Why can't [an independent actor] recover Pu-239 from the core of a uranium reactor? I'll admit I don't know a lot about chemical reprocessing, but the proposition here is using a series of highly corrosive and/or explosive chemicals ([fuming] nitric acid, tributyl phosphate, hydrazine) to extract Pu-239 from very radioactive irradiated fuel rods with unknown actinide concentrations. Chemical reagents for this process (e.g. for PUREX, tributyl phosphate) are controlled and monitored by non-proliferation agencies. Chemical re-processing will not separate the Pu-240 from the Pu-239. Pu-239 is unsuitable for a gun-type weapon, as it is so fissile that it will blow itself apart in a partial detonation ("fizzle") before the slug and target are brought together--this means you need an implosion-type ("Fat man") weapon to effectively use Pu-239 as a fuel. A high concentration of Pu-240 exacerbates this problem. A fizzle in a populated area is still very bad, but not bad in a way that couldn't feasibly be produced by conventional explosives and/or chemical weapons much more easily. In order to produce enough Pu-239 to form a weapons core within years instead of decades or centuries (provided extraction is feasible), the independent actor probably is looking at a >1 MW reactor with the cooling towers and infrastructure that surrounds a project of that scale.
It is really only a viable threat for a terrorist organization if that organization has the clandestine support of a nation state.
EDIT: Or otherwise enough financial support, technical expertise, and freedom of activity to engage in serious construction projects and industrial chemistry. The point is that it's not something you can put together in a basement lab.
This sounds like an really great story if you feel like sharing; I'm hooked to hear more about this guy, why he's in jail and the attempt on your life...
Apologies if it was really traumatic and I'm being insensative...
One incident, lane 2 of an unlit section of dual carriageway around 22:00 hrs coming out of Cambridge. Travelling in lane 2, closest to the central reservation which had armco barriers. No cars in front, passed some cars few seconds before hand, saw a bloke crouched down between the two armco barriers and he released a Muntjac deer in front of car in order to cause collision. Cars I had passed earlier, two of them had slowed down in both lanes slowing up traffic behind them. On the surface, if I wasnt vigilant, I'd never have seen the bloke crouched down in the central reservation, but my headlights spreading out to the side gave me a momentary glimpse. Had an accident ensued it would have been passed off and reported as just a wild animal collision, in this case a deer. The fact I saw the bloke crouched down though gave the game away, reported to Norfolk constabulary, they were not interested.
Out of interest, going by your username, do you consider yourself to be autistic? You write exactly like a relative of mine who definitely has something undiagnosed.
> If you wrote his degree titles out in full, it would take half a page of A4 before he could even start writing a letter.
No, his full degree titles do not take up 300 words.
If you want to converse online without sounding completely crazy, focus on reducing the ridiculous hyperbole and stick to short, comprehensive and digestible statements that flow together and form a cohesive argument/statement.
But the comment wasn't intended to be a cohesive argument/statement, it was a personal anecdote with mild exaggeration for the effect of being entertaining. I don't see the commenter as crazy at all; at worst a bit overenthusiastic to share details about their uncle who probably had some sort of security clearance. Why do you have to be so rude?
In retrospect I regret my phrasing, but I cannot change it now.
Still, I have a point. The comment I was replying to contains lots of disconnected insinuations dropped casually. Including apparently that he has had people try to kill him.
You cannot casually mention these things in a rambling monologue without sounding crazy. And discussions with crazy people on the internet are hardly ever fruitful.
So working on improving how you communicate to ensure people don’t completely dismiss what you say is a valuable exercise.
This reminds me of the Xerox machine in the Soviet Embassy. Xerox embedded a small camera that recorded every photocopied document on microfilm and recovered the microfilm for the CIA whenever they serviced the machine.
So the soviets didn't bother to check the american made Xerox machine for bugs and just let it rip at their confidential documents? I find that hard to belive. Got a source?
This is when Xerox machines were first invented; otherwise they would probably have used a Soviet-produced photocopier instead of using a magical American machine in the first place.
People in the real world often have terrible opsec. Maybe we take our instincts about information security for granted these days. Maybe the Soviets just photocopied their own butts to prank the CIA. I honestly don’t know.
It did exist, but KGB realized it was thread early on and prevented mass adoption. The access to ability to photocopy has highly restricted, but it did not prevent people from copying forbidden literature. https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Vladimir_Fridkin
> KGB realized it was thread early on and prevented mass adoption
I don't think they had to actually "prevent" it — just as jeans, baby diapers, disposable paper towels and stockings, USSR was just very bad at consumer items. It didn't even had real mass adoption of toilet paper.
While true, samizdat was already a threat to the regime and I’m sure the wide availability of photocopiers would have made that a much bigger headache for the Soviet government. They already resorted to registering typewriters because that’s how samizdat was typically produced and copied.
Absolutely spot on David Shayer…
This project was real w/o a doubt.
There was whole surreal drama & interesting story about how this project was kicked off & then kept secret.
The Case of the Top Secret iPod
> We on the iPod engineering team were impressed. But Apple corporate didn’t like it. Starting with the iPod nano, the operating system was signed with a digital signature to block the Linux hackers (and others). The boot ROM checked the digital signature before loading the operating system; if it didn’t match, it wouldn’t boot.
Why oh WHY are companies like this? If we want to put our own OS on a cool bit of hardware, what is the problem with that? Absolutely shocking mentality that needs to die (but looks like frankly it is getting worse).
Giving you the freedom to run arbitrarily code on your device means giving your government the freedom to run arbitrarily code on your device, and it means giving every hacker on the planet who finds a remote exploit the freedom to run arbitrarily code on your device.
I don’t mind that freedom being limited to desktops and specialist hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino, and taken away from everything else like a phone or an MP3 player or a printer.
What’s the saying? The ‘S’ in IoT stands for ‘security’?
> “I have a special assignment for you. Your boss doesn’t know about it. You’ll help two engineers from the US Department of Energy build a special iPod. Report only to me.
So how does this work in weekly on-on-one meetings with his boss?
It should be noted that this situation is not all that uncommon at Apple. For pre-1.0 iOS work, e.g., often individual engineers on macOS teams were tapped to do iOS specific changes to their components without their managers having clearance to know about it.
For the Mac Intel switch, the situation was even more curious, as the earlier work was carried out by a larger group of engineers, with little special secrecy, but the final stretch was done by a smaller subset of those engineers in strict secrecy, while the others were led to conclude that the effort had petered out.
The difference in this case was, of course, that the client of the special project was apparently external…
Companies do free work for large potential customers all of the time, in lots of industries. The idea is that you do something small to demonstrate your capability to take on a larger paid opportunity.
Probably out of good faith. Can't be accused of not helping the US government. Also sets a bar of how much help they'll willing to offer. Maybe also wanted control over who had access to their information, rather give it to them then have it stolen
Because complying with the government is a good idea when that government keeps giving you tax breaks and favourable treatment. Most companies, even ones that oppose some state policies (particularly surveillance), cooperate with government or get funding from them still. So not burning bridges is important. I'm sure the expenses weren't too significant but letting the project go free gives them tons of goodwill from the leaders.
It sounds like it was really just a few hours of one engineer’s time, when he didn’t have any imminent deadlines. Not enough to compromise any ongoing projects.
As was widely reported at that time, the three letter agencies were among the largest customers of NeXTStep, the software that forms the basis of the professional operating system that Apple later acquired to replace the original unorthodox (and barely functioning) software that Jobs hobbled together with a motley crew of hackers while running Apple during the DOS era. Enterprises of all kinds that had the flexibility (or pressure) to think outside of the box went with NeXTStep because it allowed totally custom applications to be developed in record time (using things like Interface Builder, today part of the visual layout in Xcode). It is totally unsurprising that they would turn to their long time partner Steve Jobs for help with a mobile solution and that he would do it for free to eventually sell of more technology to those long time customers from before he sold NeXT to Apple and became its iCEO.
It's like sticking your foot in the door on the small level, except translating it to the big picture, where spending a paltry few million on a custom iPod could lead to billion dollar contracts in the long-term.
I’m sure Apple’s government relations attorney was involved in some way and helped keep the project siloed. There was likely some contract, but is buried now.
Government pays for the work but does it through a cutout company so Apple isn't tied to work. They get the money to pay the Bechtel engineers and the government gets their iPod fairly.
Nobody has asked it yet,so I will. What is the use case for this device. I know, the article says "measure radiation without being noticed", but what are the actual situations where you would want to do that?
Presumably sending spies to gather data on nuclear weapons production sites? Wouldn't those sites have crazy operational security and would confiscate things like iPods before entering anyways?
Or is the idea to detect facilities that are building dirty-bombs in dense urban areas (a-la some scene set in middle-eastern country X from the show 'Homeland')
The use case for the iPod could be anything, but one time that Swedish authorities wanted to covertly measure radiation was during Whiskey on the rocks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_submarine_S-363). They pulled up small boats beside the sub and put Geiger counters directly against the hull while pretending to do something else.
As someone who has done some contracting work in this space, I'd say one of the use cases for this is shipping inspections at ports. Not everything the government considers sensitive is the Jason Bourne black-ops stuff most of the comments here are fantasizing about.
Because it's likely the device your longshoreman foremen and customs inspectors are already using around this inventory. If you can embed radiation detectors in them and send sensor data off to central servers at the same time, why wouldn't you?
At the time, an iPod might have been as innocent enough to not warrant any concern at a security checkpoint. Cellphones, cameras, and any other obvious recording equipment would be more scrutinized whereas a music player would not. Someone like a janitor listening to music while mopping would get less scrutiny than a visitor trying to take a tour of restricted areas with an iPod in their pocket. The visitor has to pass through the same checkpoints but the janitor is a known person, they show up to work all the time and maybe they have a story about how they won a new iPod in a raffle (while actually getting paid to walk around with it). Guards trust the janitor since he's already been vetted so they let him through with it. Or maybe he sneaks it in in the hope that he receives less punishment if caught because it's just an iPod, it's not like he smuggled in a camera. A visitor getting caught with the same iPod would be immediately kicked out get in a lot more trouble because they just received instructions not to bring anything in.
Why would you go through the pain of all this, just make the copy of the case and mimic the software UI - underneath it can be all of your custom hardware and software. No need to bother Apple. This is how most of the fake iPhones are made in China.
On second thought I wonder if it was a geiger counter that can secretly phone home and report data when connected to the Internet when the user adds music. Get into the Apple supply chain and make sure they end up in Apple stores near your "targets".
That's exactly why it would need to be undetectable.
I remembered there were third-party games available on the iPod, but checking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_game , it doesn't look like an SDK ever made it to the public.
I would imagine the "OS" doesn't have a lot of graphical routines, just to draw text/menues, scroll bar (to indicate song progress) and some library to display images (for album covers). And that it boots straight into this player app, and it has no idea of how to load other apps...
Reasonable possibility nobody involved signed an NDA or filled out any paperwork, given how unofficial it was. It's been fifteen years, it's likely the hardware in question is long deprecated in favor of covert hardware that looks like a modern smartphone or something.
It's also possibly one of the reasons we're so worried about Huawei here in the US right now: We know what our guys can do. We may know a fair bit about what China can or has done. And nobody wants to talk specifically about what those things are.
I remember a couple years ago hearing a talk about using smartphone camera sensors to detect radiation levels - the idea of using such devices is out in the open now
Can I see one and inspect the hardware? Remember, we discounted Bloomberg's story concerning SuperMicro implants (likely justifiably) for not having hardware and not naming sources. Does this story about the ability for hardware to be altered from a large manufacturer at the behest of the government with so few knowing about it for so long (even within the company), unreported by anyone else, and not going on record with their names about it until way later give any credence to other similar stories that may not yet be at the reveal names and insider info stage?
(to clarify, I believe this story and am skeptical of the Bloomberg one, I just find the 15-year secrecy and limited scope notable)
I honestly suspect the reporter was at least very confused, but the firmware for the BMC on SuperMicro boards has had some serious security vulnerabilities from time to time --- I wonder if that's the base of story, and it got confused from there.
> Only four people at Apple knew about this secret project. Me, the director of iPod Software, the vice president of the iPod Division, and the senior vice president of Hardware.
Not even Steve Jobs? Shouldn't this have been his decision?
Talk to any engineer at Apple and they’ll tell you that privacy is involved with every feature development and pervades every discussion internally. It’s not a facade.
Once upon a time, people believed that kings were appointed by God to care about common folk, guide and discipline them. It's fun to see a modern commoner showing the same dedication to a corporate business.
Many years ago I worked on open source MP3 player firmware at Rockbox.org, we created a feature to develop skins for the UI so you could make it look exactly like the original firmware if you wanted. Why wouldn't they use that, from the secrecy of their own office, instead of asking Apple (or any other manufacturer) to participate and risk the kind of "leak" that we see now?
I'll bet that many of the people who worked on iTunes probably developed on Windows as well. I'm sure Apple would prefer that every iPod user own a Mac, but at the time it launched, the market would've been like 90% PC, so surely there would've been an incentive to ensure compatibility with your dominant user-base.
> I'm sure Apple would prefer that every iPod user own a Mac
Not if it's an old mac ;-) I was an early iPod touch adopter (bought with X-mas money IIRC). Plugged it into my iBook G4 and was informed the version of iTunes was both too old and the latest this laptop was going to get.
Plugged it into a Windows 2000/XP machine (which I think was already old for the time) and it managed to get the latest version of iTunes.
Now of course, I'm aware of the context of the PPC to Intel shift and that there was a non-zero cost to maintaining both streams of iTunes build but it really put me off Apple at the time.
In Shayer's article (not the top-level BBC article) he makes the comment that they developed the iPod OS on Windows machines since the compiler and tools for building on ARM were not yet available on Mac. You make a good point about developing software for other platforms, though, and I'm sure there are also quite a few Mac and Linux boxes in software divisions at Microsoft for the same reason.
If Shayer's (in turn, Apple's) participation were classified, he would be looking at a serious criminal offense for writing the article. The hardware and functionality of the devices that the Bechtel engineers were integrating, about which Shayer only speculates, could well have been so classified, though.
I expect that the real purpose of the project was simply to let those two engineers learn iPod development. Afterward, they had the expertise and software tools to make an iPod do many things, not just collect data.
Maybe, but that wouldn’t necessarily require modifications to the iPod. iPods could be used as USB external drives and you could just load it on there without having to mess with the OS at all.
Since you are an expert, can you explain the zero day that would be needed to get Stuxnet onto the SCADA/first computer?
Obviously the final product might not have used this iPod. It was a huge operation on many levels with failed projects. This iPod also obviously might not have been for recording, since that's a level one misdirect, oh it's secret spy recording device, person who's watched to much James Bond.
But how did they do the 'usb' zero day since you know it isn't a iPod?
Get this straight - it was essentially bribing four of their workers to make an "authenic" iPod that had added functionality to secretly gather it. An overpriced pork bespoke hardware hacking project, not adding bugs to every iPod produced or anything. If anything they would be annoyed not grateful over the covert poaching and they certainly would get blocked if they tried to sue anyone over it but the losses were petty/background cost of doing business anyway.
There isn't any factual basis where that incident contribuites to that fallacious narrative. If I were a plumber and doing work on a CIA building they might do a background check so deep that it finds and analyzes any colon polyps to ensure I won't
be planting any bugs in the plumbing but it doesn't mean "I am pretty much the CIA."
Even less - it was asking for some tech support from Apple to learn how to hack Apple Hardware with their own (Bechtel) engineers - the actual hardware/software was done by Bechtel. Given this particular engineer is talking about it - they didn't have to undergo security clearance (if they had, they wouldn't be talking about it. Ever.)
All apple did was provide a little bit of JTAG/Build/Source Code support. The rest was up to a third party.
https://tidbits.com/2020/08/17/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ip...